I was able to normally flash my drive to every firmware from SD25 up to SD28, but have had to force flash back because you have to if you want to load a prior firmware.
I completely and totally disagree though that running a Linux test would not have the problems that Ironclaw found with SD25. SD25 firmware and the linux kernel in my opinion do NOT work well together, as evidenced by Ironclaw testing with multiple drives. MacOS also has the issue because it uses an underlying Linux based kernel.
I disagree with your assessment that SD26 based drives (ones that shipped with SD26) use the SSD portion, because the actual firmware filesize is so small in comparison to SD25 and SD28. I personally believe Seagate was trying to resolve the issues identified and released SD26 temporarily (and not publicly) to get drives out on the market without the issues that people were having with SD25 and previous versions.
I haven't seen a lot of reports of Windows users having problems with the SD25 firmware, but have seen a lot of issues mentioned with Linux and Mac systems. That again would point to the firmware issues being exploited by the Linux/Mac kernel rather than Windows. I'm not saying that no one on a Windows PC had issues with SD25, but I don't feel it's that widespread.
Of course there are multiple versions of the drive because there were likely multiple runs of manufacturing, but I don't think there were any real changes to the actual drive internals outside of maybe different branded flash chips or spindles.
Again, I'm not going to perform the Linux test because it's POINTLESS to do so! I expect the problem to exist, and I don't need to prove it does or doesn't because I'm running Windows where the problem has NEVER been reproduced!
Look, flash or don't flash, you seem to be looking for whatever excuse you can find to not try SD25. I am not going to convince you one way or another. Throw the drive in the trash if you want to. Take anecdotal evidence from anyone and everyone else and look for reasons to blame SD25 for my end to end errors or not.
It doesn't matter anymore. Regardless of my SMART status, my drive works BEST on SD25 and is majorly impacted with SD28. If you want to actually try to reproduce the problems I had with SD28, install Starcraft 2 and play singleplayer for a while. If you get audio stuttering, you're getting the same issue I was.
I'm done trying to convince you, and I never really was. I performed 80GB of data transfer and checksum validation against my drive to try to show that the corruption was not occuring under Windows. Take that however you want. Obviously you are too scared to give it a try, but don't try to act like you've actually done any testing on SD25 to say that it's good/bad or otherwise. At least I went through the paces on a Windows build to see that it's not a problem.
If I was to run Linux? First thing I'd do is run the Ironclaw test. I probably wouldn't run SD25, definitely wouldn't if I had a problem.
I've done what I can in Windows, and there are no issues I can see outside of having a drastically faster boot time and overall more responsive system than any other firmware. At least I went as far as to test it.
